


a good soldier and nothing else

by galamiel



Category: Mass Effect
Genre: Destroy Ending, F/M, Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-02-24
Updated: 2013-02-24
Packaged: 2017-12-03 11:17:13
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,348
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/697676
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/galamiel/pseuds/galamiel
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Even dying, Shepard knows what she is. She's a good soldier, and good soldiers follow orders.</p>
            </blockquote>





	a good soldier and nothing else

“you’ll destroy most of the technology you rely on,” it said.

“even you are partly synthetic,” it continued.

She didn’t know what to feel. She couldn’t think, couldn’t breathe, could hardly hear the tinny, robotic noises twisted into the voice of the child she had so often had nightmares about. Even now, her mouth filled with blood, her heart beating faster than it should, her body aflame with pain, she felt like this was a dream. She felt like all she had to do was find the child crouched amidst the trees, all she had to do was pick him up and hold him to her chest, take him away from Earth.

She had seen the skycar explode.

Her vision was going dark. She lifted her hand and wiped at her eye, succeeding in only smearing more blood across her face. She took a breath, lungs rattling, feeling like she was trying to breathe in space again, trapped in the void between stars and gasping for air, desperate and denied what she needed.

“But the reapers will be destroyed?” she heard herself ask. Her voice was wrong. Everything sounded far away, like she was underwater, like her comm was halfway between the right and wrong frequency. There was a buzz at the back of her mind, someone’s voice whispering to her. Admiral Hackett’s? Anderson’s? No, Anderson was dead. She thought so, at least. She couldn’t remember.

Maybe she was dead.

The image of the child swam before her eyes and darkness threatened to overtake her. She fell to her knees with a thud, her abused joints screaming with pain. She clutched at her stomach, coughing, vomiting. Black sludge fell from her lips taking the form of letters, names, before her very eyes. They marched across the shiny silver floor, accusing her, blaming her. _Ashley Williams. Charles Pressly. Mordin Solus. Thane Krios. Legion. It’s all your fault. Why didn’t you save us? Why didn’t you do more? It’s all your fault._ She blinked and the words were gone, replaced by her own blood.

The hallucination took over her vision again. It sounded impatient, angry with her, like she wasn’t the hero it expected. What kind of pathetic savior got so far only to die before it could go through with the saving? She wasn’t a very good hero, she guessed. She hadn’t ever wanted to be one.

“the peace wont last,” it was telling her when she could finally hear it again. “your children will create synthetics. the chaos will return.”

“And how would you know?” she asked, baring her bloody teeth at the child. Her dry lips cracked, split open with the movement, bringing fresh beads of blood to the surface. “How would you know? You never gave us a chance. There are countless civilizations that you never bothered to even give a chance.” Her eyes moved, gazing out upon the reapers and exploding ships she could barely see. Every moment she hesitated, another life was snuffed out. She felt the weight every one of them settle on her shoulders, felt every single name scratched into her heart. She wondered what the organ would look like if she could see it; a mass of names written atop each other, whittling it down to a lump. The names of three hundred thousand batarians.

 _Edi’s name?_ some part of her whispered.

“you could take my place,” the flickering image was saying. It was becoming harder and harder to focus on the smear of light in front of her, harder to understand what it was saying. It sounded insistent, though. Was this something important? Where was she? Where was Garrus? She turned to look behind her for the turian, expecting to hear a laughing, flanged voice in her ear _ive got your six, shepard_ but all she felt was pain as she tried to move her body in a way it didn’t want to move, tried to force her broken bones into strange positions. The pain cleared her mind, and she found the child recapturing her attention. “control the reapers.”

“Control the...?” Who was speaking? Was that her voice? “Control them, and become like you, like The Illusive Man, harvesting billions of organics, destroying innocents, thinking it’s for some greater good? No.” She had enough deaths on her soul, enough spirits picking at her skin at night, expanding within her, begging to be released. She felt them murmuring within her now, hands pressing against the thinness of her flesh, voices pleading _let us go let us go_ and Ashley’s soft breath _come with us, Shepard, it’s time now, it’s time now._

“you will lose everything you have.”

“I’ve already lost everything.” _That’s a lie,_ Ashley sighed to her. _That’s a lie. Garrus is still there. You put him on the_ Normandy _. You left without him watching your back. He wasn’t there last time you died either._ She could hear Ashley’s laugh. _Maybe that goddamn turian is the only reason you survived at Virmire. You should have died there with me._ and under it the sound of deep subharmonics, _forgive the insubordination, but your boyfriend has an order for you. come back alive. itd be an awfully empty galaxy without you._

Softest of all, the susurrus of _i love you too,_ echoed by every being she held inside her body, every name on the tip of her tongue, every pair of lovers, every family, every parent and child, brother and sister that she had ever killed.

“there is one other option,” she heard. She was having trouble understand who was speaking between the hallucination and the souls now, between the itch at the back of her brain and the fire that threatened to consume her body every time she moved a centimeter. “synthesis.”

“Synthesis?”

“everything you are will be absorbed and sent out. you will merge with every creature - synthetic and organic. you will create something new.”

 _yes YES_  she could feel the blood on her hands moving, the blood of everyone she had ever killed, of every innocent whose life had been torn away by one wrong choice. They were part of her, she knew. They made up a majority of what she was, ninety nine percent of her weight measured in guilt and the lives of innocents. And if she was to become one with everything, then they would as well. They would rejoin the living.

“But I can’t do that to those who still live,” she said. She didn’t know if she was talking to herself, to the hallucination, to the souls. “I can’t force them to take on something they never asked for.”

 _We never asked to die,_ she could hear Ash say. She squeezed her eyes shut, felt hot tears well up inside them. Tears, or more blood? she wondered. How much blood could she lose before she died? Even someone as full of cybernetics as she was still needed a beating heart to live.

She thought that maybe she passed out, blackness overcoming her on that platform at the very top of the Citadel, darkness despite the crucible’s painfully bright radiance ( _it looks like a god would_ , she thought, _like the will of god extending down from heaven to give me this chance._ Part of her wondered if maybe it was the light of a goddess, one of Thane’s many goddesses, and she heard his voice just for a moment, _siha,_ and Kolyat’s afterwards, _kalahira, this one’s heart is pure, but beset by wickedness and contention. guide this one, kalahira, and she will be a companion to you as she was to me._ ) She didn’t know how long she was out for - long enough that the illusion in front of her, the thing with the dead child’s face, was angry with her, its rage warping the image of the child it wore. “choose,” it demanded of her, voice empty and howling, resonating through her entire being.

Is this what Saren felt in his last moment? she wondered. Or The Illusive Man? Did they feel the full fury of the projection upon them, controlling them? Were Benezia’s limbs as heavy as lead, her mouth dry as the desert, her chest full of souls?

And at the back of her skull that itch bloomed to life again, buzzing and coughing, the constant static interrupt of a comm with a weak signal. This time she knew it was Hackett’s voice _“--sh-- are you th-- shepard? --dying-- shepard-- need you-- soldier--”_

“You did good, child,” Anderson had told her, but she hadn’t done good enough. People were still dying, and it was her job to stop that. She was a soldier, and she had orders. She lifted her head, fingers curling around the gun that she had forgotten was there. She was a good soldier, too. How many had she killed because she was order to? How long had she stayed under house arrest because she was ordered to? And how many of those orders had she taken without even giving them a second thought?

She was a good soldier.

She struggled to her feet, wobbling, dizzy, the spirits around her simultaneously trying to pull her down and hold her up. She felt nauseous, her stomach roiling, threatening to send more blood through her lips, more blood and names and souls. Her mouth tightened and she took one staggering step forward, leveling her gun at the godchild (for if the light from the crucible was the will of some god, then this thing, this illusion wearing the mask of a child, shimmering with the same light, had to be an extension of it, didn’t it?)

It would be useless to shoot the thing, but she wanted to, oh how she wanted to. She wanted to put a bullet through it’s head, right between the eyes, watch it jerk backwards, blood and brains spattering the silver ground behind it, body toppling from the height of the Citadel, falling through orbit, burning until it was gone, nothing left but the bits of gore it had left behind. She staggered away from it, breathing heavily, every inhalation reminding her of the copper blood on her tongue, pooling in her mouth. She turned and tried to run, pain shooting up her legs, every step shaking something loose inside her. She heard the howling of the spirits, plucking at the armor that had melded to her burned flesh, tugging her torn pants, beggining her to release them to everyone else, to choose synthesis.

But she turned right, limped across that precarious bridge, every step she took with her blood-slick boots threatening to be her last. She turned, and she raised her gun, her finger pulling smoothly against the trigger as it had a thousand, a million times before, arm used to the slight recoil, the warmth of the heat sink familiar under her hand. She was a good soldier, even dying, and her shot hit its mark, burrowing into the glass of the controls and leaving behind a spiderweb of white cracks. She took another shot, then a third, a fourth, a fifth maybe, ejecting the heat sink as the glass exploded and everything turned red.

This death was vaguely similar to the first time she died, she thought. She was stuck in the space between stars again, floating, burning, lungs collapsing, her hands feverishly clawing at her back and face, _where was her helmet?_ , and somewhere in the itchy back of her brain she heard the crackling of comms, the yells and cheers of celebration as reaper after reaper fell to the ground, as husks and banshees became lifeless horrors, nothing more than the nightmares of a child as they lay in the streets, every street, in every world. She heard her name in every mouth: _shepard, shepard_ , and it was a joyful sound, and the souls inside of her rushed to her mouth, prying her lips open with icy fingers ( _speak us, too,_ they whispered to the living) and the vacuum of space filled her lungs and body and the flame was gone, and she was cold and the souls upon her lips, the names written on her heart, left her body, dancing in the space between stars, lovers and families; parents and children; brothers and sisters reunited, and it was her name on the tips of their tongues as well: _shepard, shepard._

She was the one falling from orbit, not the godchild. Her body would be burned up with the rubble of the Citadel, of the crucible, and no one would find her, not even her ashes. And somewhere in the buzz in the back of her brain she heard _joker, we have to go_ and knew they were safe, they were safe, she had followed her orders and she had kept them safe, and she let go of them as the shockwave hit every mass relay, exploding, just like the stars in the darkness of her eyes, just like every synapse in her brain and she was ready to let go.

 _Not yet, Commander,_ she heard, and there was Ashley ( _I let you go,_ thought Shepard. _I let you go, why are you still here?_ ), reaching out to hold her face in those ghostly hands and Shepard felt herself being settled into rubble, her mouth thick with blood and her chest on fire and she sucked in a deep breath, every nerve ending screaming at her, body aflame, and she began to cry.

“Ashley...” Shepard said, her voice quieter than a whisper, hoarse, throat shredded from the explosion that had destroyed every reaper, every geth, every mass relay, _Edi._ “Please, Ashley, let me...” hot tears rolled down her cheeks and she laid there in the center of the destruction.

 _You still have one last order,_ she heard Ashley say, and her heart, her lump of a heart, every name erased from it, thumped in her chest, and blackness overcame her and in the back of her head she heard that voice she knew so well, _come back alive._

And if she was nothing else, at least she was a good soldier.


End file.
